


in firmament's descent

by oonseentia



Series: necromancer au [2]
Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Blood and Gore, F/F, Magic, Minor Character Death, Necromancer AU, please read the notes, rated 'e' for blood and gore not for horniness, vague political scheming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:40:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24086746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonseentia/pseuds/oonseentia
Summary: Destiny plays favorites and it's not afraid to show it, but when Hyejoo goes into the woods one day to find the king lying in a pool of his own blood, she wonders.
Relationships: Ha Sooyoung | Yves/Kim Jiwoo | Chuu, Park Chaewon | Go Won/Son Hyejoo | Olivia Hye
Series: necromancer au [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1737772
Comments: 18
Kudos: 39





	1. Prologue - Hyejoo

**Author's Note:**

> please read the tags and the notes before you decide to read this story!  
> so, hello. the idea of hyejoo as a necromancer just came to me like a whisper from a god with an obscure agenda, and it grew into the absolute longest thing i've ever written.  
> because of the subject matter, this fic will include somewhat graphic descriptions of:  
> \- gore;  
> \- blood;  
> \- decay and decomposition;  
> \- death;  
> if you are uncomfortable with any of that, maybe give this one a skip. the last thing i want is to upset or trigger anyone, so please, be safe about this.  
> i will include notes at the beginning of every chapter where there are additional themes that might be upsetting, so, again, please make sure to read the notes before you engage with the text.  
> this first chapter will also include mentions of:  
> \- animal violence (hunting);  
> \- death of parents;  
> \- desecration of a corpse (it is, after all, a necromancer au)  
> ⮡ if you want to skip the specifics of this, stop reading at "The first step is" and start again at "The king stirs"  
> if you are fine with all of that, please enjoy this story! if not, i'm sorry, i'll try to make the next one lighter.

The basement under the castle is quiet and cold, empty but for the four of them. The stale air of the underground feels charged, somehow, as if the walls themselves are the lungs of a living beast, holding its breath in tension. 

Hyejoo catches herself doing the same and lets out a shuddering breath, her joints cracking as she works to unclench her bare hands from the folds of her skirts. The knife Jiwoo procured is small and encased in mother of pearl, looking almost dainty in the dim glow of the oil lamp; Chaewon tenses at the sight of it, and Hyejoo wants, nonsensically, to comfort her.

“If you would prefer to wait outside,” Sooyoung starts to say from the doorway where she’s standing guard, but Chaewon cuts her off with a shake of her head.

“I would stay,” she says in a steady voice, even as her hand shakes where it rests on Hyejoo’s shoulder. She turns to face Hyejoo and continues, more softly, “if you’ll have me.”

There’s something about this moment, looking into Chaewon’s grave eyes, that fills Hyejoo’s mouth with all manner of words she can’t afford to say aloud. She bites them all back, swallows them down lest they spill over her lips, saves them for a later they might not have.

“Of course,” she says instead. Chaewon seems to hear it all regardless, her fingers tightening just a fraction on Hyejoo’s shoulder.

The bowl, already half-filled with water, makes a loud scraping noise as Jiwoo repositions it between them. She takes Hyejoo’s left hand and turns it upwards, pressing the knife gently against the side of her wrist. Jiwoo looks up at her one last time in a silent question. Hyejoo breathes, nods, and braces herself as the knife sinks into her skin.

It is said that history tends to repeat itself. That is true of many things, of war and hope and life itself, and it is true for Hyejoo, even if she herself doesn’t know it. Hyejoo’s story also begins with blood and sacrifice, with secrets whispered into the night, and with a choice from which there is no going back.

Once upon a time, at the edge of the continent, a young couple made a bargain with death to give birth to a child. Nine months later, on a cliff by the sea, a child was born on a full moon night. Hyejoo was the only daughter of a couple of witch doctors, a quiet, sullen child of a quiet, sullen couple. Every day, right after breakfast, her father would take the cart filled with poultices and potions into town, peddling them off to the townsfolk for food and cloth while her mother foraged for ingredients in the forest west from home. Hyejoo herself kept her company until she was old enough to be deemed a nuisance, and with no natural gifts for picking out useful plants and fungi, was relegated to hunting as soon as she managed to wield a slingshot with no grave injuries to herself. By the time her father’s cart would show up on the horizon, dusk settling in at his back, her mother would be chopping up vegetables for supper while Hyejoo skinned whatever small animal she managed to take down.

On the day Hyejoo turns seven, her father brings her a small bow from town, along with a quiver with 15 arrows inside. He also gifts her a pair of gloves - not cloth gloves, like the ones he and mother wear around the clock, but proper archer gloves, the leather stiff around her fingers. It’s different from the slingshot, but not by much, and in five days she manages to shoot a snow-white rabbit clean through the head while hunting. Her mother doesn’t quite smile at the catch, and Hyejoo doesn’t expect her to, but she knows it’s a good one; rabbits are very useful. Not much meat in them, but her mother will probably use the fur as lining for the new patch to Hyejoo’s winter coat, already a bit too tight around the shoulders, and grind their bones for the fertility potions that always sell so well. Her mother’s work is slow, slower still during winter as her lungs struggle to function, but it’s still steady enough. Hyejoo asks once why she didn’t just make a potion for her cough, but the rasped reply of ‘can’t put out a fire with kerosene’ leaves her more confused than before, so she doesn’t press.

Winter melts into spring. The cough worsens. Her father starts leaving for longer stretches of time, several days on the road per trip, always coming back with some new herb or rune or crystal that always fails to have any impact on the gray pallor of her skin. Whenever he looks at Hyejoo, which is less and less often as her mother’s situation continues to worsen, it’s with a heavy emotion that she can’t yet understand, but would later think back on as resignation.

It’s mid-spring when they bury her mother under the old willow tree out the back of the house. Her father clings to her shoulder as they stand by the grave, the faint sound of the waves down at the beach echoing in the silence. She thinks of a storybook she read once, of a princess who lost her mother and wept herself to sleep over her grave, and wonders idly if she should be crying as well.

Two winters come and pass. Hyejoo buries her father under the same willow tree, fallen to the same malady that had taken her mother before him. ‘Take whatever is in my pockets,’ he had said, his chest shuddering with the effort to speak. ‘Take my boots and my coat too. Take everything you need. Do whatever it takes to survive.’

Destiny plays favorites and it's not afraid to show it. There's no ignoring that when you live on the bottom of the food chain. For some, that means learning to roll with the punches, making do with whatever scraps life throws at you; for others, it means learning to play the odds, to hedge around the system and try to force it to work in your favor.

Hyejoo is not sly enough for the latter, but not patient enough for the former either, which translates into a life of frustration and barely getting by. Scarcity hones her skills as a hunter; the forest seems to cling longer and longer to winter with each passing year, the grass refusing to grow back long after the snow has melted, making every animal she does come across indispensable for survival. 

She grows into her father’s coat, but sells his boots for more arrowheads on a rare visit to the town. She does away with most of their personal items as the years go by, learns to stitch by fitting their old clothes to her frame, sells whatever she can’t work into a usable shape. A growth spurt at age 13 burns through the rest of their closet, and Hyejoo turns to the old furniture, lugging whatever was expendable onto her father’s cart to trade in town. 

As the forest grows empty and the fields around it grow barren, each piece earns her less and less. On a month that should have been summer, she manages to catch a deer - the arrow pierces it straight through the throat, and it’s dead before it hits the ground. Hyejoo cuts it open and guts it still in the woods, hauls its hollow carcass onto the cart on her back, sells it to the local butcher for a week’s worth of flour and milk. On her way out of town, a merchant tries to sell her deer hide gloves for half that price. She comes to town less often after that.

And so the old books of her parents’ library remain, old and battered and covered in arcane knowledge of dubious origins, not valuable enough to be sold for bread. Hyejoo takes to reading them before bed, skimming through the long paragraphs of magical theory only to thumb through the notes her parents left along the corners - a scratched out instruction, a ‘stir counter-clockwise instead’ in her mother’s tiny cursive looping around the text. She traces the letters with a fingertip and wonders, quietly, if she misses them.

Destiny plays favorites and it's not afraid to show it, but when Hyejoo goes into the woods one day to find the king lying in a pool of his own blood, she wonders.

Magic, for those uninitiated, is a binary of Light and Dark, wherein Light is Good and Dark is Bad. Good magic can heal people and make flowers bloom, while Bad magic brings disease and death with it.

In reality, magic, as most things, doesn't deal in absolutes.

The gradient in which magic operates has very little to do with preconceived notions of human morality, and much more to do with the perversion of the Natural Order - any magic will seek to alter the state of reality, and the degree to which such changes will contradict the laws of nature is the true measure of its quality.

Some laws are easier to break than others, naturally. Manipulating a pre-existing element will tend to be easier than creating something that doesn't yet exist, for example, like creating rain on a cloudy day rather than on a sunny one. The hierarchy varies in places, and the circumstances must always be taken into consideration, but above all there is Time, and Time does not take defiance lightly.

The king is dead. His body is still warm to the touch, even with the late autumn chill, and the gory gash on his side still bleeds sluggishly when Hyejoo turns the body around, but his pulse is still as she presses an ungloved hand at his throat. She counts his rings, calculates how many daggers they’d get her at the market, shakes her head. Who would buy the king’s signet ring?

The king is dead. He’s dead in the dead of the woods, miles away from town, miles away from anyone. There’s no signs of a battle, not even a robbery. There’s no search party calling out for him in the distance. There’s only the quiet of the woods and a corpse in a puddle. Hyejoo’s eyes trail the path of blood leading off to the east, towards the shore. The nearest port is six miles south of where they stand.

Hyejoo hauls his body to the house slung over her shoulders, dropping it into the ground of her mother’s old work room as she scans the shelves for a specific tome, a leather-bound volume filled with handwritten footnotes. Time is uncooperative, but he can’t have been dead for more than an hour or two. Surely a compromise can be reached.

The first step is to close the wound. The still-leaking blood isn’t going to be helpful one way or another. She cuts the embroidered fabric around the gash with scissors, pulling on the scraps that started sticking to the skin as the blood congealed, rinses the dirt from the flesh with water, and stitches the skin back together layer by layer. The thread is a bit too coarse for the job, the first loop on the needle snagging at every puncture made to the skin, but it doesn’t shed or fray, so it does the job. The book describes a concoction of cinnamon, neem and flaxseed to fight off potential infection, but Hyejoo figures a dead man doesn’t have to concern himself with such matters.

The second step is to access the brain. Storybooks like to link the heart to one’s life, but the heart can only be persuaded to work if the brain is in working order. Hyejoo removes the dead king’s crown and traces a line around his head with chalk in its place, tying the upper half of his hair out of the way before following the line with a sharp skinning knife. The blood that had drained to the left side of his body as he laid on the ground seeps through his hair, making the blade slippery, and Hyejoo tightens her grip on the handle as she maneuvers him around the reach the back of his head. She then cuts through the bone with a handsaw, very carefully, as to not damage the soft tissue inside, and pries it open with her fingers.

The third step is to prepare the vessel. Brains are always unpleasant to the touch, spongy and slick with fluids, but the years as a hunter made the process of carving it out of the skull come naturally even with the unusual dimensions. She severs the optical nerves, delicately carving the indicated rune on the sclera directly above the incision before pressing the eyeballs back into their orbits. A note in her father’s scratchy handwriting advises her to add a third rune to the inside of the frontal bone for better adhesion, so she does that as well. More runes are carved along the inner walls of the skull, and more still to the top piece she had separated prior - boring, meticulous work, made harder by the mess of cerebral fluid and diluted blood obscuring the view.

The fourth step is to restart the nervous system. With a clean knife, Hyejoo starts to cut a pattern into her left palm, a complex geometric array of lines and symbols conscribed by two concentric circles. Blood trickles from her palm into the hollowed out cavity of the king’s skull, the fresh runes glowing faintly with each drop that hits them, and then brighter once the pattern is completed. The book instructs her to fill the head with something living (a moth, caught in the window panes and pinned in place with needles), as well as something of hers (a lock of hair, braided and tied into a knot). A final set of four runes is carved along the rim of the incision, to lock the lid into place, and Hyejoo closes the skull with the pattern on her left hand pressed into the king’s scalp, reciting the incantation penned by her mother aloud.

The king stirs, trashes, stills; his glassy eyes open and stare unseeingly at the ceiling of the work room. ‘Lift your left arm,’ Hyejoo thinks. The king’s arm shoots up from the ground.

The king is dead. Long live the king.


	2. Prologue - Chaewon

Once upon a time, in a castle amidst the mountains, a child was born at the break of dawn. Chaewon was the one and only daughter to the king, an infamous philanderer who nevertheless failed to sire any other children from his first three wives or multiple lovers. She inherited her mother’s delicate beauty and quick wits, but not her freedom; once her mother grew tired of the king’s promiscuous proclivities and moved away to the Summer Palace by the Eastern Sea, Chaewon, the sole heir to the throne, remained.

As a child, Chaewon would visit her once a year, being sent to spend the winter months on the ostensibly warmer East Coast and returning to the castle at the break of spring. The palace was beautiful, full of colorful stained glass windows and spun glass chandeliers that made the whole structure gleam like a jewel in the sun, and it suited her mother better than any aspect of her former life ever did. Chaewon remarks upon this during a visit shortly after her twelfth birthday, attempting small talk to distract herself from the pain of the chambermaid pulling on her hair to braid it for the day.

“Of course it does,” her mother replies, inspecting the flower arrangement on the vanity, “it is why I chose to be here.”

The scrape of the pins against her scalp makes Chaewon grimace, but a sharp glance from her mother has her schooling her face back into a neutral expression.

“Women of our station are always expected to follow a certain path,” her mother says after a beat. “To make the best of our situations, as it were, though I suppose that’s true of most everyone.”

The chambermaid sets a final pin to Chaewon’s hair and steps back, her hands clasped in front of her body. Chaewon’s mother appraises the result, tilting Chaewon’s chin this way and that to examine it, then nods at the chambermaid who exits quietly.

“I have always hated that notion,” she continues, walking around the vanity to look out of the window. The overcast winter sky makes her face look paler, older. “Life isn’t a play, nor are we actors fated to read the lines written to us by some fate or deity. We are able to strive for more, and we owe nothing less to ourselves.”

She turns to Chaewon, who straightens up in her chair subconsciously.

“Trust no one but yourself to look out for your best interests, Chaewon. Take the reins of your life or someone else will do it for you. I know better than most that the court isn’t a welcoming place; you must do whatever it takes to survive in it.”

On her thirteenth birthday, her father announces Chaewon will no longer visit her mother for winter, as she’s to begin her studies as heir to the throne in earnest. She remembers her mother, standing pale and old by a beautiful glass window, and guiltily bites back her relief at the news.

The words linger, however, echoing back in her head whenever the ladies in waiting titter inanely around her as they walk through the inner gardens. Her mother had been a lady in waiting to the king’s third wife, just as the third wife had been to her predecessor, and her in turn to the first queen. There is the motif, in storybooks and old poems, of the forlorn noble, trapped by the obligations of their station like a bird in a gilded cage; rather than a cage, Chaewon feels stuck in a nest of adders, one where the only way out is through.

Her one respite of it all is Jiwoo, daughter of the late court physician. Jiwoo is all round smiles and round eyes on a round little face, and Chaewon loves her a bit. She talks fast, over and under and around herself, a habit the tutors at the castle stop expecting her to outgrow in time, and even if her words don't quite reach Chaewon most of the time, her relentless optimism is a rare comfort. Jiwoo smiles excitedly when Chaewon tells her she won’t be leaving for winter anymore, smiles mischievously when they manage to sneak out of their lessons early to steal sweetcakes from the kitchen, smiles dreamily when talking about the new squire that joined the king’s guard; when Jiwoo confides that she’s being let off from magical training for her lack of progress and Chaewon flounders for a word of comfort, she smiles again, just a bit strained around the edges.

“It was just a matter of time, really,” she shrugs a bit, not quite meeting Chaewon’s eyes. “I… can I be honest, Your Highness?”

“Of course.”

“I never really wanted to be a physician,” she says, then catches herself, her eyes wide. “I don’t mean any disrespect by that! It’s such an honor to even have the chance!”

“I took no offense, Jiwoo, it’s alright,” Chaewon cuts her off, fighting back a laugh she feels wouldn’t help matters. “Although I have to admit I never thought you might not want it before, with how enthusiastic you always seemed over your lessons.”

“Oh, I do like the lessons! It’s just the practical part that doesn’t sound all that appealing to me. I like learning,” she says earnestly, hands gripping her own skirt, “I think it’s what I like most in the world.”

“Other than pretty squires who bring you fruit from the market?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Your Highness.”

“Ah, my mistake.”

They stare at each other in mock seriousness for a beat or two before descending into giggles, Jiwoo’s laughter dying down into a besotted smile while Chaewon watches her fondly. Jiwoo might be her only friend in the entire court, she thinks idly to herself, but in moments like this, it’s hard to feel shortchanged.

“I do mean it about the magic lessons,” she continues, her face still a bit pink. “I’d make a pretty bad physician if I can’t cast a single spell, and it’s not like it was my life’s ambition or anything.”

“But?” Chaewon prompts gently.

“But… I can’t say I won’t miss the lessons, I guess. I feel like there’s still a lot left to learn, even if I won’t get to put any of it in practice.” Jiwoo fiddles with one of her sleeves, making a face as she pulls a leaf from the back of her wrist. 

Thaumoregulation, also called magic leakage, is a common enough affliction of magically inclined children: the body can’t yet store the magic it generates properly, so it seeps out through the skin instead, manifesting as light or small particles. Though it was first observed in toddlers, a generational analysis shows a steady increase of its duration with the progression of time, with most cases in recent years stabilizing by the time the child turns ten. Scholars believe this correlates to a growing trend in the magical population to reach magical maturity later in life - as the body matures, the magic settles into the bloodstream, which in turn allows the sorcerer to tap into its power and wield it.

Jiwoo’s condition, instead of improving, only worsens throughout puberty, evolving from specs of moss to blades of grass before finally settling at fully bloomed flowers when she turns fourteen. Jiwoo is at once very open and very closed, telling all this and more easily to Chaewon while keeping her feelings on the matter hidden behind a too-earnest smile, but soon enough the flowers start betraying her true heart. It’s easy enough to sense a pattern - sprigs of lily-of-the-valley curling around her fingers as she laughs, specks of marigold brushing up her neck as she bites back tears, tiny little forget-me-nots dotting her hair whenever they walk by the knight’s barracks. While she talks of her discontinued studies with a steady voice and a carefree smile, the bright red snapdragons blooming just behind her ears tell a different story.

Chaewon notices, files it away in her head, but doesn’t press. Jiwoo is allowed the privacy of her own thoughts.

That night, as Chaewon brushes her hair to prepare for bed, she starts plotting the skeleton of a request to keep the library open to all the castle’s inhabitants. Though the idea of making such a request is a tad nerve-wrecking, she takes some solace in the fact that the positives would potentially far outweigh the negatives. Jiwoo should be allowed to continue her studies, and surely there must be others like her, who could benefit from the knowledge to which they were denied access. Even if not all of them can wield magic to practical effects, they could still become scholars and tutors, and furthering the field of the natural arts would certainly be a benefit to the kingdom. Chaewon begins to braid her hair loosely to keep it from tangling, the nerves from before giving way to a quiet excitement. Perhaps her own tutor could help her hone her arguments before she took them to the king. After all, it is about Jiwoo, yes, but it is also a political act, is it not? A valid exercise for the future, surely. She giggles quietly to herself. Perhaps she might even make a request for a formal audience over this matter.

Chaewon dreams in short snippets that night, each impression of a memory feeling like a piece of a larger puzzle she can’t seem to parse: a field of wild violets, a brown bird perched on a tower, shards of glass in the sun. A table in a dark room, four downturned cards. She reaches with a hand that isn’t hers and flips the leftmost one over to reveal the image of a child holding up a coin. The disjointed images stay stark on her mind after she wakes up, and so she writes them down, hopefully to make more sense of them at a later date.

When she does tell her tutor of her plans for the library that afternoon, his face flickers through a series of microexpressions too quick for her to fully grasp before settling back into a somewhat forced neutrality.

“It is a noble thought, Your Highness,” he says after a beat.

“But?”

“But,” he continues, face still carefully neutral, “His Majesty is rather… keen on tradition, as it were, in matters such as these. Unless you could find a historical precedent for your proposal, I have doubts that even the most refined of rhetorics would do much to sway his stance.”

She frowns, mulling it over in her head.

“Even if it would only benefit the kingdom?”

“Even so, Your Highness.”

“I see,” she says, even if she doesn’t. “Thank you.”

Chaewon sits in on a council meeting a few days later, a recent addition to her schedule. Her chair, tucked between two large windows to the side of the oval table the council occupies, allows her a clear view of the king, as well as about two thirds of the participants. She watches him carefully through the proceedings, trying to catalogue what arguments he seems to favor, but the arguments only seem to matter inasmuch as who says them - she’s fairly certain she sees two different nobles suggest the exact same maintenance schedule for the moat around the Western Fortress during Summer, only for the first one to be dismissed and the second one to be approved instantly. It sits oddly with her until the end of the meeting, but she tries to push it off her mind as she rushes to follow the king out of the room.

“Father,” she calls out firmly, straightening her posture.

Chaewon’s father was crowned king very young, ascending to the throne at age 15 after his own father fell in battle, and hasn’t developed much as a ruler since. Charitably described as an ineffective leader, his only political skill seems to be having the sense to appease those with the most resources, thus keeping the odds in his favor even without the support of a significant portion of the court.

He turns his face to greet her with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Ah, Chaewon,” he says. Though it’s morning, he already (or perhaps still) reeks of stale mead. Chaewon hopes her own smile seems more genuine than his.

“I was hoping to discuss a small matter with you, father,” she starts, tries to catch his eye as he begins to head down the hall. “Do you have a minute?”

“Sorry, today is no good for me. My schedule is full, you know how it is - or, well, I suppose you will when you’re older.”

He laughs distractedly at his own joke. Chaewon bites her tongue, takes a deep breath, tries again.

“It would really only take a minute, father,” she insists, hurrying down his side. “It’s a very small matter, and I’d only need your approval, really, I can make arrangements myself--”

“Yes, yes, very interesting. You,” he points to the guard on his left, a surly man with a large scar running across his face, “tell the cook I’ll be taking lunch in my rooms today, and you,” he then points to the guard on his right, who looks much older and milder, “make sure I am not disturbed until then. I’ll see you later, Chaewon.”

He waves without glancing back and enters his room, the door shutting behind him. The older knight gives Chaewon a pitying look. She grits her teeth, feels her neck hot under her hair, musters a tight smile in response, and swallows down the urge to run down the hall, keeping her pace and posture steady as she leaves.

She tries again once, twice, three times. Two weeks later, at the end of her wits, she corners him on the way to supper, bypassing protocol before he can have a chance to ignore her.

“Father, I would like to request that access to the library be extended to the entire castle.”

He blinks down at her, clearly not expecting this, but seems to recover soon enough.

“The libraries are open to all resident nobles and scholars,” he recites apathetically, a stark contrast to the restrained contempt her tutor had used to say the very same words. “It has always been that way.”

“I know, father, but if we--”

“When you are queen, Chaewon, change whatever you please and handle the consequences on your own,” he interrupts, the apathy in his voice now apparent in his expression as well. “I won’t cast aside centuries of tradition because of a whim of yours.”

With that, he leaves, heading down towards the main hall for supper as if nothing happened. Standing in the hallway, Chaewon clenches her fists, nods sharply at the old knight when he turns a sad glance at her as he follows the king, and waits until they turn a corner before finally letting the tears fall from her eyes, her face burning with humiliation. Later, when Jiwoo asks her if she’s alright, Chaewon blames her swollen face on a bad night’s sleep, and Jiwoo is kind enough to pretend to believe it.

The event tinges Chaewon’s distant perception of her father with a bitterness that only increases with the years. Behaviors she once thought were just the standard for someone in his position now struck her as callous, and his political posture is reframed from neutral to disinterested and unprepared in her eyes. At council meetings, she takes to observing the rest of the nobles, and it’s easy now to recognize the frustration in their eyes as he ignores their arguments over the requests of someone with more money or bannermen. Even as she graduates from her seat by the windows to a seat at the table, she recognizes the shift for the symbolic move that it is and keeps her thoughts to herself, choosing instead to observe and learn as much about the council as she can.

The older nobility, whose forefathers had pledged allegiance to the first king of this court, was mostly an assortment of knights, with a couple of scholars among their ranks. Most of them had served under the late king and fought with him in the Battle for the Southern Lands, a battle that ended up claiming the king’s life and which the current king forfeited as soon as he rose to the throne. Knights of the Southern Lands are, understandably, less than pleased with the king, but after the war depleted their armies and shrunk their territories, they simply lack the numbers to make any sort of significant opposition to him and the wealthy northern lords who support him.

The newer nobility, wealthy merchants who bought seats at the council as the territories expanded and their services became more influential, also seems torn on the matter of the king. The heavy taxation of the populace means less people have the means to engage with the commerce at all, and the increasingly long winters produce increasingly low food stocks that the king seems to be in no rush to address; the coastal merchants, however, thrive with replenishing the food stocks of those with the coin for it with imports priced several times above their worth.

Their contempt rises with time to match Chaewon’s, but, much like hers, is kept at bay by their unfavorable position. It is hard, at times, for her to keep a neutral expression when a suggestion she agrees with gets shot down with no consideration, but time and practice makes her an expert at hiding resentment.

The king’s old knight passes away during the summer of her seventeenth year, his body laid to rest in the crypt of the town’s church in honor of his service to the throne. Jiwoo’s pretty squire takes up his vacant position, and though she is unusually young for a king’s guard, the knights appear to be pleased with this development. Chaewon finds her dedication admirable, if unusual for a noble, but it’s the tension in her shoulders at being dismissed for yet another day as the king philanders his way through town that propels Chaewon to reach out for her.

“I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced yet, have we?”

The girl startles at her question, the metallic clanging of her armor echoing in the empty hallway as she tries to regain her posture. From this close, it’s easy to see the uncertain trembling in the girl’s eyes, even as she tries to school her face into a more polite blankness.

“I apologize, Your Highness.”

Her voice is elegant and steady, with a hint of vulnerability, and Chaewon thinks it suits her.

“There is no need to apologize,” Chaewon says, smiling gently at her. “I’m quite certain the protocol for this situation absolves you of any guilt. I’m only hoping to remedy this situation now that we have a chance.”

“Ah,” she blinks in surprise. Chaewon surmises she must be from a minor house, as her reactions suggest she doesn’t have much experience in court, and wonders yet again at her being made a king’s guard. She continues after a beat. “Thank you, Your Highness. My name is Sooyoung. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

She bows her head, the armor clanging yet again trying to accommodate a gesture it wasn’t built for.

“You as well. Though I must say, it almost feels a bit odd that we hadn’t met already, Sooyoung,” she says, fighting back a grin when Sooyoung looks at her in confusion. “We do have a friend in common, after all, and even outside of that, it’s not as if the castle is all that big.”

“Quite the contrary,” she mutters seemingly without meaning to, shooting an alarmed glance at Chaewon who just smiles guilelessly in return. She seems to relax a fraction, and a tentative smile dances around the corners of her lips as she replies. “Jiwoo is a good kid.”

“She is,” Chaewon agrees, and the smile settles more firmly on Sooyoung’s face. “I can’t imagine how my life would have been without her.”

“I know what you mean,” she agrees quietly. Her whole face seems to soften in that moment, like even her features grow warm at the thought, and the openness of it makes something wistful unfurl in Chaewon’s chest.

They grow closer in time, falling into step with one another whenever the king is not away but not quite present, but the skittishness of that first meeting never leaves entirely, just fades into the background of Sooyoung’s personality. Chaewon could almost believe this was just integral to Sooyoung if not for the glimpses she gets at a different story, the occasional moments in Jiwoo’s study where Jiwoo talks excitedly about her personal research and Sooyoung listens and gasps and smiles. Chaewon takes to slipping out of the room in these moments, and though she would like to claim it was selflessness that drove her out, she can’t lie to herself well enough for it. There is a part of her that aches at their easy familiarity, at the softness of it despite the sharp edges of them both, and being witness to it makes Chaewon realize how lonely she is. 

They always shower Chaewon in flustered apologies when they realize it’s happened again, and Chaewon always waves off their concern with a smile. The loneliness stings at times, but she refuses to allow it to fester into bitterness, lest it becomes yet another wedge between her and them. Once, as the king and his retinue are getting ready to march off into the marshlands out west, she catches them talking quietly just out of sight at the doorway to the main hall, their heads bowed low together, and it’s a brief thing but it still resonates deep in her chest. She notices one of the king’s advisors making his way across the hall and intercepts him with some inane question about their objectives, hoping to gain them a few more minutes to say their goodbyes. When Sooyoung eventually makes her way into the hall with a single gardenia tucked in the folds of her armor, she catches Chaewon’s eye as subtly as she can and nods, a tiny smile on her lips. [1]

In the intervals where the king is away, administrative matters of the region fall to Chaewon. There’s always both little and lots to do, as most of the king’s subordinates have learned to operate independent of him by now, but matters that should never have been delegated in the first place are slowly brought back to be judged by Chaewon as she proves herself a more active participant in them. Any issue classed as urgent is sent directly to the king through a messenger, but as food shortages become increasingly common, it’s easy enough for Chaewon to pass measure after measure reducing the amount of produce farmers owe to the castle, safe in the knowledge that the king won’t bother looking for the actual figures unless it’s brought to his attention. The insurgencies at the southern border are outside of her jurisdiction, but slightly increasing patrols around the inner territories to ward off the ever growing number of bandits is a small matter settled quickly between her and the council. One of the younger lords calls out to her at the end of the meeting, asks her if his apprentices can be granted permission to enter the library without him during their coordinated research into more effective agricultural techniques, and there’s a part of her that thrives in the petty vindication of finally opening the libraries to the public.

The king, naturally, fails to notice that as well. Chaewon wonders for a moment if he even remembers her request of years ago, but abandons that line of thought quickly enough, as neither possible answer to that question would bring her any sort of comfort.

In his absence, it’s Chaewon who holds audiences at the throne room, sitting ramrod straight with her legs crossed at the ankles even long after the room is emptied out. Being an only child, there was never much reason for her to develop ambitions for the throne; it has always felt inevitable, inexorable, certain as death. It is therefore not ambition that sometimes causes her to almost hope the king might not make it back when he sets off on a day trip to some nobleman’s keep or a night visit to some noblewoman’s chambers, just the pragmatic cynicism brought on by years of exposure to incompetence. These moments are usually followed by a beat of guilt at the pit of her stomach, but even then, even in the privacy of her own mind, Chaewon can’t tell if her feelings are genuine or if she’s just performing them for no one’s benefit out of habit.

She sighs as she stands up, biting back a wince at the pain in her legs after sitting down for so long, and steps out into the inner garden to catch the last of the autumn sun. It’s mostly empty by now, with the open space inviting the cold evening air far too effectively this time of the year, but there’s the echo of a quiet conversation somewhere in the patio that gives Chaewon pause.

“I just worry she might be cold,” she hears Jiwoo’s voice say from somewhere near the outer edge of the garden, and it’s easy enough to guess whom she’s talking about from her tone. “Oh, maybe I should knit her a scarf for the road!”

“And since when do you knit, silly girl?” Chaewon doesn’t recognize the second voice, but it sounds like an old woman, raspy and a bit shrill.

“I could learn!”

“Ha!”

Jiwoo harrumphs loudly and stomps away, stepping out from behind a large hydrangea bush and directly into Chaewon’s line of sight.

“Your Highness!” Jiwoo’s voice is loud in the quiet of the garden, causing a couple of birds to startle and fly away. “Were you, uh,” she blinks her wide eyes, shakes her head, smiles. Chaewon notes the hellebore petals peeking out of her palms before she moves to clasp her hands behind her back. “Were you looking for me?”

“Oh, I was just taking a stroll, don’t mind me. Did I interrupt you?”

“Interrupt me? No, of course not, I was just thinking aloud. Sorry if I disturbed you.”

“Not at all,” she replies, approaching Jiwoo. 

There is no one else behind the bush. Jiwoo still looks tense, hands clasped firmly behind her back. Chaewon files that away in her mind, almost a habit by this point, before smiling at Jiwoo.

“Well, then, if you aren’t busy, perhaps you’d join me for tea? You must be cold from being out here.”

“Tea would be nice,” she agrees, relaxing a fraction.

Chaewon has come to accept over the years that Jiwoo has many secrets, only some of which she is willing to share. That in itself is far from unusual for a member of the court, and navigating the intricacies of what that entails is a large part of Chaewon’s future as a ruler. What is unusual is how trustworthy Jiwoo is in spite of all of that, how she struggles to keep those parts of her closed, as if being anything less than candid goes against her very nature - and it probably does, at that. It is this more than anything else that holds Chaewon’s curiosity at bay, even when the questions pile up in her mind. 

The king and his retinue return from the Eastern shore nine days later, much to Jiwoo’s delight. She spends the days that follow with a mottled scallop shell pinned carefully to the front of her clothes, a quiet smile rising to her lips as she sometimes catches sight of it in her peripheral vision. 

On the third day of their return, one of the castle aides whispers quietly to Chaewon during breakfast that she will have to fill in for the king at council that morning, as he wasn’t in his bedchambers. She bites back a sigh, thanks him, downs the last of her tea, and rushes off to read the reports before the council arrives. 

By the time the meeting is over, the king’s absence is starting to draw concern; Sooyoung nods tersely at her as she and the rest of the guard leave to search for him in town. The lords don’t comment on it, though at least some of them have doubtless heard the rumor by now. Chaewon wonders quietly what the protocol is for the timeframe of demonstrating concern in such matters.

By lunch time, with still no sign of the king, the guard returns to the castle and prepares to march out of the keep. Chaewon sees them off by the gate, the wild violets braided into Sooyoung’s hair giving her an odd sense of dejá vu.

Night falls with no news on the king’s whereabouts. Chaewon’s dreams are odd and shapeless, filled with the scent of smoke and saltwater and petrichor. Then it shifts, oddly, familiarly: a table in a dark room, four downturned cards. She reaches with a hand that isn’t hers and flips the second one from the left over to reveal the image of a girl brandishing a sword. She wakes up confused, writes it down under the last such dream she had, and feels like she’s trying to put together a puzzle with no solution.

As acclimated as she is to filling in for the king in his absence, the tension that settles over the castle in the following days makes Chaewon restless and uncomfortable. The king has been known to run off on his own from time to time, but never quite like this, never for more than a few hours. Life without him carries on, arguably more effectively than under his care, but the thought of the most powerful man on the land vanishing into thin air in the dead of night inside his own castle is still unsettling. Four days into her tenure as acting regent, Chaewon gets pulled out of a meeting regarding grain storage by a frantic looking aide.

“Is everything alright?”

“Ah, yes, Your Highness. That is to say, something has happened, but,” she seems to flounder for a moment, “the King is back.”

“Oh,” Chaewon says, blinking in surprise. “Well, those are good news, are they not?”

“Well,” the aide replies, “well, yes, I suppose, Your Highness, but he seems very… odd? And there is someone with him.”

“Someone?”

“A girl. A witch, probably, considering the situation. The King claims he was injured and she helped him.”

Chaewon pauses. Injured. Missing for four days, a witch, an injury.

“Did he say what happened?”

“No, Your Highness. He said he can’t remember anything after leaving the castle.”

“I see,” Chaewon says, even though she doesn’t. “Where is he now?”

“At the throne room, Your Highness.”

“Thank you.”

The girl curtsies and leaves in a hurry. Chaewon breathes in, out, rolls her shoulders back. There will be time to process everything later; for now, the important is to get the truth of what happened, or at least a plausible enough simulation of the truth to appease the rest of the court. Getting the king to talk might be like pulling teeth, but there is another witness. She straightens her back further, steeling herself, and knocks on the wooden door of the throne room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] jiwoo and sooyoung will be exchanging letters throughout this story  
> some of them are plot relevant, some not so much  
> i will be posting some of the ones on this second category in a [separate fic](/works/24086989/), just in case you feel like reading some more chuuves  
> so, when you see a number between brackets in the story, you can find a corresponding piece of correspondence on the side fic :)
> 
> edit [july/2020]  
> i COMPLETELY forgot to mention i'm using flower language for jiwoo's condition because i am, in fact, a moron  
> relevant flowers for this chapter, in order of appearance:  
> lily-of-the-valley - sweetness, joy  
> marigold - grief  
> forget-me-not - true love  
> snapdragon - deception  
> violet - faithfulness  
> gardenia - secret love  
> hellebore - anxiety


	3. Intermission 1 - Jiwoo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a letter from jiwoo to sooyoung

My dear friend,

I have news for you, some good and some odd. 

The king is back, which is good news, if only because it means you too can come back. Please do try to act surprised about it when you hear it from the messenger. Should I even be telling you this if you’re going to be told the same thing soon? Well, if you’re reading this, it means I’ve already written and sent it, so I guess the point is moot.

I’m sorry, the structure of this letter is all wrong. This entire situation is so confusing that I feel I need to write down my thoughts as they come to me or else I lose them entirely and ten new thoughts take their place. Hello, my friend. How are you? I suppose I can’t exactly ask how goes the search after that opening, though I do honestly hope it hasn’t been too taxing on you considering the result. On that note, I cannot tell you whether I’m more relieved or frustrated that the king came back on his own, because while this means you can finally come back, it also means that all the time you spent away was for precisely nothing.

I’m sorry, you of course already know all this. I just miss you very much, and it feels as though I wouldn’t have had to had he just decided to not act in this manner.

Oh, but ‘on his own’ wasn’t really very accurate of me. These are the odd news I mentioned earlier, actually. I’ve heard there was a girl with him, but I haven’t gotten a chance to take a look at her myself. People are saying she’s probably a bastard child he had with some mistress ages ago, but I don’t see how that would make any sense. How would that explain anything, even? It just occurred to him randomly one night to take off on foot, with no retinue, to go fetch a secret daughter by himself? I refuse to even consider that a theory.

I haven’t seen our friend since then either. The council is probably discussing the situation right now, and I doubt they’ll be done any time soon. My letter will probably reach you before the meeting is adjourned, honestly, and the messenger should reach your camp by nightfall. 

I wish I could just close my eyes and have you back here already. I know thinking this way won’t help me, but just thinking you’re still at least a day away from me makes me want to steal the messenger’s horse and go find you myself.

Be safe, and come back to me safe. I will be waiting for you at the gate.

\- J


	4. Chapter 1 - Hyejoo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The princess’s hands feel warm around hers. She feels her own fingers spasm inside the cage they create, unsure if she meant to recoil at the touch or press back against the heat, so she does neither and just allows herself to be held still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please read the notes before continuing!  
> this chapter includes:  
> \- depictions of anxiety, including the beginnings of an anxiety attack;  
> ⮡ if you want to skip the specifics of this, stop reading at "disorientating and overwhelming" and start again at "“Your Majesty,” greets one of the guards"  
> \- brief descriptions of wounds;  
> \- allusions to death of parents;  
> \- one brief dip into the uncanny valley  
> ⮡ if you want to skip the specifics of this, stop reading at "he must be famished from his time on the road" and start again at "The road can be so tiring."  
> again, if any of the subject matter in this story could be upsetting to you, feel free to abandon this fic! this got more readers than i thought it would (which is really exciting!) but i want everyone who does engage with it to have a good time. take care of yourselves first <3

To a child of the woods, the bustle of the town is almost deafening.

This is not to say the woods are quiet, exactly; at least, they shouldn’t be. Before the bitter drought took hold of the land, there were the birds and bugs and rustling tree leaves, the ebbing white noise of a place undeniably alive. Hyejoo, having by now spent half her life alone in a dying forest, is so used to the silence that even quick trips to the neighboring town are disorientating and overwhelming.

The capital, by contrast, feels like a different world altogether. The winding streets spiral inwards and upwards, coiled like a snake around its prey, and the noise seems to stick to Hyejoo as she moves through town, clinging to her skin, sliding down into her lungs, reverberating inside her skull and under her eyelids. The people make way as they go, dropping into hurried curtsies as they lay eyes on the king, but the noise escalates as their progression moves them closer and closer to the castle, and Hyejoo forces herself to breathe, closing her trembling hands into fists.

By the time they finally reach the gates to the keep, Hyejoo’s hair is sticking to her neck, her face plastered with sweat even in the cold autumn air. The guards startle into attention as soon as they make out the visage of the king, one of them running off into the castle while the others rush to meet them halfway. She takes this opportunity to regain her composure, hands clasped behind her back, left thumb pressing the space between the tendons of her forearm until it quells down the turning of her stomach. The deerskin leather of her single glove is coarse against her bare wrist, but its familiar texture feels grounding.

“Your Majesty,” greets one of the guards, bowing as he comes to a stop. 

He glances at Hyejoo askance, then back at the king, as if expecting something. She clenches her teeth. The town continues to buzz loudly at their backs, and the knights are unmoving in between them and the castle.

“We had been searching for you for--”

“I am here now,” the king cuts him off at Hyejoo’s order. “Do you plan to keep me away from the throne for even longer?”

They seem to startle at the response, but comply quickly enough, which is all that matters. Hyejoo has neither the time nor the inclination to learn the intricacies of court decorum, and whatever offense the king inadvertently causes in her wake will soon be buried along with him. The castle is emptier than the streets by a large margin, but the noise seems to echo down its stone halls, blurring together in its reverberations until it’s nothing but vibrations in her ear. Hyejoo tries to keep track of the path as the guards lead them further and further into the keep, counts every passage she can see leading off into sunlight, bites down the urge to run away.

Their procession finally comes to a halt in a large, open room. A small group of guards, including the one that had run into the keep before them, stand at attention in the middle of the room surrounding a young man in expensive looking clothes.

“Your Majesty,” he says, bowing his head, then turns his gaze to Hyejoo. “And a guest?”

His calm countenance is a stark contrast to the frazzled posture of the rest of the men, but something about his courteous smile makes the back of her neck tingle with suspicion.

“She found me,” Hyejoo replies through the king, “and fixed my wounds.”

The man blinks at that, his polite smile faltering at the edges.

“You were injured, sire? How did that come to happen?”

“I do not recall. I don’t recall ever leaving the castle.”

“Well, it is a good thing she found you, then! I apologize, I’m afraid I didn’t catch the lady’s name.”

“It’s Hyejoo,” she interjects, already fed up with the conversation. The man turns his polite smile onto her, and she clenches her teeth in response.

“Ah, then, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Lady Hyejoo.”

He stretches out a hand to her, which she takes, bemused. The bemusement escalates into bewilderment when the man raises her hand and presses his lips briefly to her bare knuckles, and she barely manages to fight down the reflex to snatch her hand back instantly. He drops it quickly enough, stepping back and continuing to talk in his strange lilt.

“My name is Youngmin, I am an advisor to the king. I must thank you for your service to His Majesty.”

“Yes,” the king agrees, hopefully not too hastily. “She should be rewarded for her services.”

“Naturally, Your Majesty. You must be tired from your journey, should I have the servants draw you a bath?”

The king’s robes are torn under his heavy cloak, his hair matted and tangled with congealed blood. There is no reason to refuse a bath, no matter how much Hyejoo wants there to be.

“Fine.”

“The court physicians can tend to you afterwards, unless Your Highness would rather have them see to you now.”

The king’s stomach is torn under his heavy cloak, his hair matted and tangled with congealed blood over a sharp cut surrounding the entire circumference of his skull. Hyejoo has never met a court physician, but she doubts those are things one would fail to notice.

“Can the girl not attest for my health? I walked all the way here after her care.”

Youngmin frowns at this, as if confused by the reply. The neckline of Hyejoo’s shirt feels like a noose around her neck.

“I am sure the lady has done exemplary work, Your Majesty, but medical treatment does not end at dressing a wound. Surely it would be better to have someone verify that the healing process is proceeding as it should, would it not?”

A second refusal will draw suspicions; an acquiescence will confirm them. Hyejoo flounders between two wrong answers until a knock at the door breaks the silence. The guards turn to look at the king, awaiting orders, so Hyejoo makes him nod, grateful for the break in the conversation.

A girl walks in, short and prim, with gold braided in her hair. The smile she flashes the king doesn’t quite reach her pretty eyes.

“Father,” the princess greets. Her voice is soft and high-pitched, but her enunciation is clear. “I heard news of your arrival.”

She then turns to Hyejoo with the same expectant gaze the guards and the advisor had given her before. It’s grating, this constant flow of unvoiced questions, as though they expect her to be able to navigate their customs just by virtue of being in their proximity, but at least Hyejoo now has a precedent for this particular interaction. She takes one of the princess’s hands, curling her own calloused fingers under hers, and brings it up to her face, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. There is a sharp intake of breath and then a beat of silence. The princess’s eyes are almost doe-like, wide and dark and glossy, but startled rather than fearful.

“I am Hyejoo,” she says, letting go what feels like a moment too late. “I found the king and fixed his wounds.”

“I… see,” the princess says after a beat. “I’m Chaewon. I must thank you for bringing my father back.”

“Must you?” Hyejoo says, startling when she realizes she spoke aloud. Chaewon’s smile seems to slip for a second at that, and though it’s back to form quickly enough, the reaction feels somehow significant.

“Of course! I’m certain the king himself will want to reward you for your services, but he is not the only one indebted to you in this situation. Lord Youngmin,” she calls out to the man, who seems to be biting back a smile, “I understand a feast would be impossible on such short notice, but do you suppose we could ask the kitchens for something to mark the occasion?”

Youngmin sends a glance to the king, whose face Hyejoo doesn’t think to emote, and seems to take his lack of reaction as agreement.

“I believe that could be arranged, You Highness.”

“Wonderful! Hyejoo, is there anything you’d like to eat? I can’t promise we have everything in stock, but our kitchen staff is very skilled.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Hyejoo replies, torn between the urge to leave as soon as possible and the prospect of a free meal.

“It is the least we could do, truly. How about some baked pears? They’re more common in winter, I know, but I should think the weather is cold enough to enjoy one.”

The princess speaks in a tone that seems to imply a familiarity between them, and while it isn’t as unpleasant as the droning whispers of the townsfolk, it is just as unsettling. Hyejoo wonders if this is simply how young women regularly talk to one another, then wonders if she’s ever spoken to another young woman before. Wonders if this even qualifies as a conversation, when Chaewon continues to look expectantly at her waiting for replies Hyejoo doesn’t know to give. She nods instead, almost sighing in relief when the princess seems to accept that as a valid response, but the sigh gets caught in her throat when Chaewon grips her bare hand with both of hers.

“Good choice,” she says, which is odd, because Hyejoo feels she hasn’t made any choices since leaving home. “I’m afraid dinner will still take an hour or two. Would you like a bath while you wait? I’m sure the journey here can’t have been easy.”

Her enunciation is still clear, but the proximity makes her words blur at the edges of Hyejoo’s mind. The princess’s hands feel warm around hers. She feels her own fingers spasm inside the cage they create, unsure if she meant to recoil at the touch or press back against the heat, so she does neither and just allows herself to be held still.

Chaewon still continues to look expectantly. If this does qualify as a conversation, Hyejoo feels she’s failing at it. She almost nods again from sheer muscle memory before the question catches up to her properly. How would she control the king without seeing him?

“The girl will stand by my door while I bathe,” she makes the king interject, hoping no one will question it. “She can have a bath herself while I rest.”

The smile on Chaewon’s face turns brittle around the edges, her hands tightening a fraction around Hyejoo’s fingers, but she says nothing. Youngmin does, however, after a second of hesitation.

“Your Majesty,” he says quietly, “I understand your concerns, but surely it would be best to have one of the court physicians in the bathing pool with you? Should something happen, you might be unable to call for help, after all, and--”

“I am perfectly able to bathe myself,” the king interrupts once again. Can Chaewon feel how her palm is beginning to sweat? “Just have her stand by the door. She was the one who patched me up, she should be able to fix any issues I have.”

“As you say, sire,” Youngmin says, bowing. He gives Hyejoo a regretful glance she barely registers, the tension of this whole situation making her stomach turn again, before nodding to one of the guards at the door of the room.

“I can stand guard with her, sire,” says the guard, a young man with high cheekbones. He smiles at Hyejoo, brief but kind, then turns back to the king’s advisor. “In case something does happen, an extra pair of hands would not go amiss, I reckon.”

Much is said on the nature of humankind. Most of it is useless drivel, as are most sweeping statements of the sort, but one argument that comes close to universality is that of adaptability. Given enough time, humans will adapt themselves to just about any situation, mold themselves to fit the niche presented to them, a resilience born of water rather than stone. 

Hyejoo, a hunter born to a dying land, has little insight into the intricacies of the human mind, but much insight into detecting behavioral patterns. The difference between an animal poised to flee and one poised to fight is the difference between having food on your plate or going to bed hungry, and Hyejoo has grown to fit the niche of a hunter by learning to read the cues hidden in the body language of living things.

The new guard, whose name she doesn’t catch, is well-spoken and thoughtful, but it’s his light steps that really register with her. The steel plate armor of the palace guards is heavy and cumbersome, more for decoration than for protection, but the man’s footsteps are light under its metallic clangor, almost careful; a hunter’s gait. He catches her eye, flashes that same brief but kind smile, and she notes the tenseness in his jaw as he turns back.

So the man is clearly hiding something, but it’s not like Hyejoo has the moral high ground to find fault with that, and so she doesn’t bother. If anything, as far as she’s concerned, the fact that he doesn’t attempt to engage either her or the king in any sort of conversation makes him easily the most tolerable person in the castle. Even as they stand at either side of the door, Hyejoo with her eyes set on the stone wall across the hall as she thinks instructions at the king that will hopefully pass for a bath, the man seems content to wait in silence. By the time the king emerges, damp and disheveled but mercifully clothed, Hyejoo can’t even remember what the guard’s voice sounded like.

“I’ll be recuperating in my chambers until supper,” the king speaks. “See to it that I’m not disturbed.”

“Yes, sire.”

“The girl is free to do as she pleases in the meantime,” she makes him add when the guard seems to hesitate for a beat.

“Yes, sire,” he replies, then turns and bows his head to her. “If you’ll excuse me, Lady Hyejoo.”

She nods at the man whose name she still doesn’t know and sends the king to tail him to his chambers. Lady Hyejoo. Her name was said more times today than it had been in a decade, the sound of it as unfamiliar in these strangers’ mouths as it had been in the mouth of the king when she placed it there herself. No, not quite unfamiliar, but brittle and dry with disuse, something she lost sometime in the past and no longer fully recognizes as her own. Who had been the last person to know it? None of the villagers cared to ask whenever she ventured into town to exchange animal parts for goods. Who had been the last person to say it? She thinks of her mother, pulls on the memory like a fishing line, but can only conjure up the vaguest impression of a sound. She tries to remember the shape of her name on her father’s lips but his features are vague in her mind, like grasping at mist.

The silence of the hallway makes her ears ring. Hyejoo retraces her steps in her mind - she could run. Slip through the coils of this serpentine city and never look back, keep on walking until…

Until. She clenches her fists, feels the dull thrum of pain on her left palm as the coarse leather glove scrapes against the scabs of the carved incantation. Until she’s back where she started, trying to make three meals out of a sparrow while the king’s court dines on baked pears? No, a couple hours of discomfort is more than a fair price to pay for a way out of poverty. The thought settles like mortar into the cracks of her resolve.

There are footsteps approaching from the end of the hallway. Hyejoo steels herself, assuming it to be Youngmin coming to force more frivolous nonsense into her unfortunately empty schedule, but is met instead with a girl that seems as surprised to see her as she is.

“Oh,” she says in a bright voice, “are you the witch?”

Technically, yes. She nods. The girl smiles brightly, but her round eyes are a bit too earnest.

“Well, nice to meet you! I’m a witch too, I suppose, but I can’t actually do magic. I guess scholar would be more apt?” Hyejoo barely has time to wonder if she’s supposed to answer the question before the girl continues to talk. “I’m Jiwoo, by the way! What is your name?”

Jiwoo’s smile is even more strained at the edges than the princess’s had been. Hyejoo ponders briefly if just saying the castle staff doesn’t need to try and be welcoming to her would be worth the effort, but ends up deciding against it. They will likely just find a way to be even more aggravating if she shows any resistance.

“Hyejoo,” she says at last. Jiwoo seems slightly uncomfortable with the whole interaction, which is something they have in common, at least.

“Well, nice to meet you, Hyejoo.”

“You’ve said that already,” Hyejoo speaks without meaning to for the second time in the day.

“Ah, I guess I have,” she laughs, awkward, looks for a way to continue this conversation neither of them wants to be in, seems to find it. “Oh! Will you be staying for supper?”

“Chaewon told me to.”

Jiwoo blinks, surprised, but forces the smile back onto her face for no one’s benefit. Courtly life seems awfully demanding on one’s facial muscles.

“Oh, so you’ve already met Her Highness! She must have been so relieved at having her father back.” Hyejoo thinks back to the strained smile on the princess’s face, but doesn’t comment on it. “Well, in that case, would you like me to show you the way to the mess hall? It’s still a bit early for supper, but at least you’ll be able to find your way back like this.”

Hyejoo nods, the prospect of ending this conversation making her sigh in relief. Jiwoo’s smile goes thin and tense, but she nods back, then once again as she begins walking down the hall.

“If I may ask,” she says after a moment, her voice a bit lower than before, “how did you come to find the king?”

Hyejoo’s confusion must be plain on her face, as the girl continues after taking one look at her:

“It’s just that… well, the knights have been searching for him for days now, but no one else outside the castle even knew he was missing, to my knowledge. I suppose I’m just curious,” she finishes with a forced laugh.

“I found him while I was hunting,” Hyejoo answers honestly, as that’s the only part of her story she doesn’t need to embellish. “Out in the forest. I don’t know why he was there.”

Jiwoo pauses, turning to look at her with a complicated expression. She looks around the hallway quickly, verifies that they’re alone, leans closer to Hyejoo.

“When you say forest,” she begins carefully, her voice just a hair above a whisper, “do you mean the Gray Woods? To the south?”

She says it like it’s relevant, for some reason. Hyejoo takes note of that, but has no idea what to do with the information, instead just nodding in confirmation. The girl hums, bites her lips, opens her mouth to speak again--

“Ah, there you are,” Youngmin’s voice cuts her off before she can start and she startles, straightening her back and plastering the same polite smile back onto her face. “Oh, Jiwoo, I hadn’t seen you there. Have you met Lady Hyejoo, then?”

“Lord Youngmin,” she greets, bowing her head. “Yes, I ran into her outside the bath house! We were heading to the mess hall.”

“I see,” he says amicably. “I am very sorry to intrude, but would you mind if I stole her for a minute? I promise it won’t take long.”

“Oh, of course, sir,” she agrees, a bit flustered. She glances sideways at Hyejoo and flashes her a thin smile, “I will see you later, then, Hyejoo.”

Youngmin waits until Jiwoo disappears down the hall, hands crossed behind his back, then turns to Hyejoo with a polite smile that sets her teeth on edge.

“I really don’t intend to take too much of you time,” he says in a tone clearly meant to appease. “I just hoped to ask you a few questions, if I may.”

It’s framed as a question, but she doesn’t really have the option to refuse. Youngmin still waits until she nods before continuing.

“First, as His Majesty still seems reluctant to see one of the court’s physicians, I’d like to ask you for more details on his condition. He mentioned an injury, if I’m not mistaken…?”

“He was stabbed in the stomach.”

Youngmin’s eyes widen, his hand coming up to clutch at his own stomach.

“Are you certain?”

“Of course I’m certain,” it slips out of her mouth while she’s too busy being offended to swallow it back down.

“Of course,” he says, shaking his head, and then once again, “of course, I apologize, Lady Hyejoo, I was just surprised. When did you come across him?”

“Four days ago. I was out hunting and found him in the forest. It took me half a day to get him back on his feet,” she continues to skirt around the truth unprompted, hoping this will bring a quicker end to this interrogation, “and then three more days to get here on a merchant’s carriage.”

“Three days on carriage,” he repeats to himself, deep in thought. “You mentioned a forest.”

“Gray Woods,” she says, watching his reaction for any sign of the skittishness Jiwoo had shown, but finding none.

“I see. You must have been close to the border, I presume?”

“About a day’s walk away from it,” she agrees.

“I don’t suppose there was anyone else with him?”

“No.”

He nods again, deep in thought. Hyejoo’s heartbeat flutters too close to the skin, a vein in her left forefinger pulsing uncomfortably inside her leather glove. The moment lingers, stifling and stagnant like a pond in summer, as she waits for the inevitable questions on the king’s condition, the treatment applied, his recovery rate.

“I see,” he repeats instead, nods, smiles. “Thank you. Oh, Jiwoo was showing you to the mess hall, wasn’t she? Since I’ve robbed you of a guide, please allow me to at least finish the job in her stead.”

She nods almost instinctively at this point, following him through the halls as her mind struggles to accept it was that simple. He talks the entire way but it’s just noise, muffled as if coming through water, and she keeps nodding through it whenever he glances back in hopes it will keep her from having to engage with the topic at hand. Torch light leaks through a large stone doorway, the metallic noise of cutlery drowning his voice even further, and she barely manages to catch the tail end of a sentence.

“... which is one of the king’s favorites, as I’m sure he must be famished from his time on the road.”

Can a corpse eat? Possibly. It can do whatever she tells it to, within reason. Can a corpse eat like a human would? There’s a sense of discomfort at the concept of the quasi-human, a visceral sort of response to that which stands just to the left of normal. Can it follow the same rhythm, the same motions as a living person? Or can it just emulate it hollowly, teeth grinding against each other like a puppet pantomiming a real person?

The road can be so tiring. The king is convalescing. Surely no one would fault him for taking supper in his rooms.

Youngmin excuses himself at the door to the mess hall, leaving Hyejoo alone in the bustle of servants setting the tables. There is a large fireplace at the back wall, tall and thin glass windows on either side, and the space is full of long wooden tables in parallel rows. The king’s seat is easy to pinpoint, taller and wider than any other at the very middle of the table set before the fireplace, and the ornate one to its right is bound to be the princess’s. Hyejoo’s bare hand twitches, as if recalling the warmth of her fingers, and she clenches it into a fist to chase the memory away.

Chaewon doesn’t take her hand again when she shows up for supper with Jiwoo in tow, but her face betrays that same flicker of tension when the king’s aide informs her His Majesty won’t be joining them in the hall. It must be a practiced thing by now, this polite smile that doesn’t touch her shuttered eyes.

“I apologize, Hyejoo,” she says in that same familiar tone from before, her eyebrows in a sympathetic arch. “My father must still be indisposed from the journey. I’m sure he’s very thankful for all you’ve done for him.”

“I understand,” Hyejoo replies, and for once means it. 

Jiwoo smiles at her when she catches her eye, but doesn’t move to join the conversation, instead excusing herself to one of the wooden tables. Hyejoo flounders for a second, unsure whether or not she’s meant to follow, but is stopped dead on her tracks by the hand Chaewon places on her forearm.

“I’m afraid I will be your only host for the night,” she says while Hyejoo wonders if she can feel her pulse stutter under her fingertips. “I hope it won’t be too dull for you.”

She’s seated to the right of Chaewon, some nobleman to her other side. There is more food on the table than she’s seen in all her life, it feels, but no one moves forward to take it; it’s only when Chaewon reaches forward to fill her plate that the rest of the table follows suit. Everything is odd and wonderful, the textures and flavors and smells so overwhelmingly new that the noise in the hall just washes over Hyejoo.

“I take it you liked the pie,” Chaewon says with a smile.

Hyejoo nods, mouth still full of pie, and Chaewon seems to almost laugh, hiding it behind her glass.

“The fish is good too,” she says when she can manage, piling more onto her plate.

“Oh, I like this dish too! My mother used to say it was a summer dish, but I feel the spices help give it an autumnal touch.”

“Fish is fish,” Hyejoo says, not really interested in what constitutes an ‘autumnal touch’. “If you like it, you should eat it.”

“I will keep that in mind,” and she does laugh this time, even if it’s brief.

The meal goes by quickly, Chaewon making small talk every once in a while. It’s less uncomfortable like this, with food in Hyejoo’s stomach and the princess’s attention divided between her and several other things. She even compliments the baked pears, entirely unprompted, and Chaewon smiles at her like they’re sharing a secret.

“I am sorry about my father,” Chaewon says again, quietly, as they leave the table. “I’m sure he will feel better come morning.”

“Morning?” Hyejoo says, coming down from her brief elation like a missed step in a staircase.

“You will be given a room to spend the night, naturally,” she continues as if that is the only issue. “I believe he plans to hold a small ceremony to reward you for your services.”

Hyejoo is forced to believe the same.

“Is that necessary? All of it,” she asks regardless, the back of her neck prickling in dread. “I don’t want any of that.”

“It is tradition, I’m afraid,” Chaewon’s voice is neutral, but the tenseness in her jaw tints it with some candidness. “But it really will be small, if it helps. Just him and the council.”

“And you?”

“And me,” she agrees. “Does that comfort you?”

Hyejoo doesn’t know how to answer that, so instead she asks, “And what will that ceremony entail?”

“Did my father not tell you?” Chaewon bites her lips, shakes her head, pulls up another hollow smile. “A great service to the crown usually entails entry into nobility, and saving the king’s life would certainly classify as a great service to him. It is a form of accolade, but as the ceremony is meant just to grant you a title in recognition for your services, it should be very brief as well.”

Hyejoo nods, conflicted. The idea of a ceremony led by the king is enough to make her spine feel like it’s made of lead, but a noble title would mean a land tenure, maybe all the way across the kingdom. A patch of fertile land at the Northern border, where she’d never need to go hungry again.

“Well,” Chaewon says, startling her out of her thoughts, “this is you, I believe.”

They stand in front of one of five identical doors on a hallway, torchlight casting long shadows on the stone walls. The door is unlocked, its key sitting on a dresser to the right, and the fireplace at the back wall is already lit. Hyejoo wonders, a bit nonsensically, how much the village’s pawn shop would pay for a bed this size.

“Lord Youngmin has the room at the end of the hallway,” Chaewon says from the doorway as Hyejoo studies the tapestry hanging from the wall. “Please, don’t hesitate to go to him if you need anything.”

Hyejoo finds very few prospects less appealing, but figures it’s not worth to say so, and just nods instead.

“Sleep well, Hyejoo,” she says as a farewell, and Hyejoo nods again, closing the door after her. She takes off her glove for the first time this day, the scabs of her wound catching in the leather and reopening in a few spots. The energy in it thrums, a quiet pulsing not unlike a second heartbeat. Hyejoo lies back on the bed, intent on planning out her schedule for tomorrow, but the exhaustion of the day catches up to her too quickly, and she’s asleep in seconds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come for the body horror stay for the regency era romance  
> hyejoo is great at reading body language until there's a pretty girl touching her and then all bets are off


	5. Intermission 2 - Sooyoung

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a letter from sooyoung to jiwoo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this letter is a direct reply to the one jiwoo wrote in chapter 3

My dearest friend,

I can see your day has been much more eventful than mine, and more fruitful as well. It feels disingenuous to continue the search after your letter, but it’s not as if I can justify stopping before the messenger arrives. Deception can be its own punishment when it entails more work, it would seem.

I appreciate the information, if only because I got to read it from you. Is that selfish of me? After all this time searching for nothing, I suppose I feel entitled to some selfishness. It’s hard to keep myself from getting frustrated at this turn of events, but as I should save the sentiment for when I’m officially notified, I’m writing this reply in hopes the thought of you can help chase away these negative feelings. It’s an exercise that has yet to fail me.

(I have considered not writing this down, but speaking of it aloud when I’m back would be no less dangerous. Still it is not something I am meant to discuss, so please burn the next page as soon as you finish reading it.)

Considering the king has managed to return without crossing paths with the search party, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that we were working on very little evidence. What should be a bit more surprising, however, is that we have found no evidence that the king has left the castle at all - by all accounts, no one even left the keep until the knights took to the training grounds at daybreak. The sentries reported no movement in or out of the city all night and all the horses are accounted for, so he shouldn’t have made it out of the inner walls, and yet no one saw him in the town either. The castle servants confirmed he went to his chambers at the usual time, only to find the room empty when one of the maids brought in his breakfast. It’s as if he’s vanished into thin air.

There is… one thing. I hesitate to even call it a lead, as the captain of the guard dismissed it entirely, but I feel you might consider it more relevant. Do you remember those holes in the lawn that the kitchen staff was afraid could be moles? The guard set a few of the younger squires to keep watch at night, just to make sure it wasn’t a racoon or something of the sort, and one of them claims he was under the king’s window when he heard a noise like ‘a crack of thunder’. We could find no other witnesses to corroborate this statement, and maybe it was just his words playing tricks on me, but I could swear there was a smell of ozone in the king’s chambers.

As for the girl you mentioned was accompanying the king, I don’t think I can add anything of value to your speculations, as I have even less information on her than you have, but I do agree that a bastard child sounds like a baseless guess. Then again, with how unprecedented this whole situation is, I can’t fault anyone for grasping at straws. Have you had a chance to see her since your last note? I’d trust your intuition over anyone’s conjectures.

I miss you very much as well. In truth, I miss you anytime I’m not with you. Thinking of it now makes the idea of having to wait to get back to you even more unbearable than it was before, somehow. If your calculations are correct, we should be back tomorrow by noon. I will count every minute until then.

Love,

Your friend.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to emme and honey for being terrible enablers


End file.
